zorba the bactrian !
Game 3 found us playing deep into the night, and me facing a Graeco Bactrian army:
| 6 Ax(X) | 6 Pk (O) | LH Ally | Kn (F) General |
| 4 Bw (O) | 1 Kn F General | 8 LH (F) | 9 Pk (O) |
| 1 El (O) | 5 Kn (F) | 1 Kn (F) Irreg | 4 LH F) |
| 1 Ps (O) | 2 LH (O) | 3 Reg Kn (F) | |
| Kn (F) General | 4 Bw (O) | 1 Ps (O) | |
| 3 ps (O) | 1 LH (O) |
With the table cluttered with H(S) type terrain, the Greeks had set up fairly conservatively in one corner, and I decided to use the standard list and throw two commands of spears and knights against them, whilst stringing out my smaller, but most spear-heavy command across the gap between two hills on the left. The Greeks were holding their knights and elephants in reserve, and had also flung out a small skirmish screen to delay the inevitable crunch.
As my army advanced, finally I changed the colour tuning on my camera to get some more acceptable pictures of the well painted Greeks!
With only a few LH harassing me, I was able to reorganize as I advanced, and fed the irregular Kn (O) through the spearwall in order to combine them with my Bw(X) and WWg (X) in order to give some very scary opposition for the column of irregular Kn (F).
Soon the skirmish screen was looking rather redundant, as the rapidly advancing Italians fragmented it with bowfire, and then trapped it against the greek lines - causing a huge drain on pips to extract them safely
The Kn (F) fought gallantly, but then suffered horribly against the knight mincing machine pushed into their faces - and with their inevitable demise, the central command of the Bactrians was burst and broken! By the hill, the Greeks were also in trouble - discovering that 3 deep pike were not quite as good as 2 deep Sp(I) backed up by regular knights! It was crunch time, and the Graeco Bactrians were the pistachio nuts !
If the Bactrian king believed in re-incarnation he would by now have surely had fear in the pit of his stomach and known with a chill certainty that 2300 years into the future he would be returning as a computer technician working in a mad billionaires Dinosaur Safari Island - and in practice he was able to realise all to well that "fences are failing all over the park!"
Graeco Bactria 230 BC |
Jurassic Park |
Game over, 10-0 to the Communist Italians !!
